jobs is spending is jobs

In a good post about the unpredictability of the economy, Derek Thompson reveals that medical spending has recently slowed considerably. In a disconnected sense, that's a very good thing, considering that health care spending is one of the very few issues where deficit hawks have a point.

But remember: spending means jobs. For awhile now, the smart money has been on going to school for a bio or premed degree, and then going on to get specific training in a medical field, whether as a doctor or nurse or medical assistant or sundry other positions. After all, all of those frightening projections of ever-growing medical costs mean that money will be coming into that field, and maybe workers can claw themselves out a little shred of that for themselves. That's the basic logic of advocating that people go into medicine; the projections say that money is going in that direction. Speaking as someone who's been on college campuses for the last four years, the push to go into medical fields has been relentless. But if the new projections are right, there's going to be $200 billion less going into medicine than we previously thought.

I've been making the case (again and again and again) that the constantly-expressed notion that we'll have full employment if people are just smart and go into STEM fields is empirically indefensible. It's all bogus; there's no STEM  shortage, no indication that there's going to be a STEM shortage, the trend is towards more STEM majors, very few people take the "impractical" majors that politicians complain about.... Thompson's post demonstrates the folly of safe haven thinking, and the needless cruelty of mocking those who have graduated into a jobless field. Do you really think that there's no chance that, in four or five years, the self-same scolding pundits will be writing about the medical school bubble that's going to crush us all? That Hamilton Nolan (or his nonunion Mexican equivalent) will be writing yet another Gawker post brutally mocking the greedy rubes who chased the medical dollar and now deserve their unhappiness? It would not surprise me at all. I have no idea if that will happen. But neither does anybody else. In those conditions, blaming people for making the wrong gamble on what field to go into isn't just cruel, it's pointless.

The reality of a "all cuts, all the time" approach to governance is fewer jobs and worse conditions for those who do have them. It's inevitable. Short term, the effort must be to stop directly undermining whatever improving employment conditions we have by cutting government jobs. But long term, the effort must be to remove the material security of our people from the whims of a bubble-plagued economy.